This morning, Magento announced upgrades to their page-caching module that will enable merchants to bring a better shopping experience to customers. Better caching translates into faster page-load times, fewer errors during checkout, and ultimately higher conversions and more revenue. The upgrade is also essential as merchants seek to balance the need to include more rich media in the shopping experience with the need to manage site performance.

For the everyday-ecommerce layman, cache = cash. Or, for the technically inclined, cache operates as a temporary storage area where frequently accessed data can be stored for faster access. Once the data is stored in the cache, it can be used in the future by accessing the cached copy rather than re-fetching or recomputing the original data. It basically reduces redundant steps and only focuses on processing information that is unique to a page.

Roy Rubin, Magento’s CEO, announced on Twitter that users of Magento Enterprise 1.7 who use the upgraded caching module can deliver page-refresh times in under .03 seconds. That is very fast. The upgrade is extremely important for the next evolution in ecommerce, where it is becoming clear that more rich media in the shopping experience yields higher conversion rates. But rich media also affects site speed, ergo the need for the caching module. This upgrade will also be especially useful for merchants who have several users on their site at one time.

Kudos to Magento’s forward thinking on this. Its one of the reasons I chose to work for them.